Meghan Lopez agreed to go for an afternoon picnic near a pond in the Hammond area with a friend one day last month. In a fatal mistake, the 21-year-old college student from Slidell also agreed to snort a drop of a mysterious drug.

Neighbors later heard her screaming. She fell into seizures, suffered brain damage and died at a hospital the next day on April 3 with her parents, Dena and Michael Lopez, at her side. They never spoke with their only child again.

"Meghan certainly thought she was coming home that night, and she didn't," Dena Lopez said Friday at Slidell police headquarters.

Her parents learned she had ingested a synthetic hallucinogen, one of a group of manufactured psychedelics with street names such as "c-boom" or "n-bomb" based on their chemical compounds. Different variations mimic the effects of LSD or PCP, police said.

Dena and Michael Lopez said on Friday that they want to spread a warning message to other parents and children.

"We just want to make sure that people and kids out there understand how lethal it is," Lopez said. "One dose, drop...can kill you instantly."

St. Tammany Parish law enforcement officials said Friday that the Lopez's decision to speak out comes at a time when officers are battling a recent outbreak of synthetic drug use in the area -- responding to five incidents within one week this month.

He said the State Police crime lab researched many versions of the chemical compounds to make the legislation as comprehensive as possible. "It does put Louisiana on the forefront," Pearson said.

Slidell police and the St. Tammany Sheriff's Office said in one week this month, they were called to five incidents involving erratic behavior from people high on the synthetics, which are typically bought on the Internet.

In one case, Slidell police on May 15 found a man on top of an unconscious man, pulling the unaware victim's hair out. Police said it took seven officers to restrain him as he kicked, punched and bit them. He nearly stopped breathing on the way to the hospital. Both men later told police they took the "n-bomb" drug.

That same day in Slidell, two men covered in blood were found in a parking lot of an apartment complex. They were mostly incoherent, but one man managed to utter that his "brain was cooking," according to police. Investigators discovered in their apartment that the men had cut themselves with glass from a broken mirror, police said. They were also high on synthetic drugs.

The other incidents also involved confused, delusional and combative people who needed medical help, according to police.

"You're playing with death," St. Tammany Parish Sheriff Jack Strain said in a news conference Friday. "This is not something parents should take lightly."

Meghan Lopez's parents described her as bright, smart, and vibrant. She was a 2009 graduate of Covington High School. "She was looking forward to life," her mother said.

Dena Lopez said in January she and her daughter were chatting together at a bookstore and Meghan showed her mother a notebook where she had written a list of her goals: re-connecting with old friends, getting the right work experience, and re-enrolling in school, which she did, at Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond. She was studying sociology.

She lived in Slidell, but stayed in Hammond with a friend two nights a week to take classes on Wednesdays and Thursdays. She also worked two jobs.

Doctors told her parents that after ingesting the drug, her heart began to beat irregularly, causing an oxygen shortage to her brain.

Her father said Meghan would have needed medical attention within minutes to have survived. "Several weeks since this has happened, people I've talked to, they've never even heard of it, and then I tell them how deadly it is," Michael Lopez said.

Dena Lopez said had her daughter known about the serious consequences of the drug, "she would not have taken it so lightly."

"Apparently, it was just presented as, 'this is fun stuff, this is great,'" she said. "And she would most certainly still want to be with us today."